Ebola Is a Symptom of Our Compounding Failures

November 5, 2014 1:15 PM

6
0

As the WHO Director-General addressed the Regional Committee for Africa two days ago, I was visiting Boane Health Center in southern Mozambique, a country in the southeastern corner of Africa. It’s very, very far from the Ebola outbreak – more than 6,000 miles from the three countries devastated by the disease. However, much of what I read in Dr. Margaret Chan’s address regarding the outbreak rang true for conditions here.

She highlighted two arguments of the WHO that “have fallen on deaf ears,” the reality of which have been starkly revealed to me while I have toured health facilities in Mozambique in the last week and a half. The first is “the urgent need to strengthen long-neglected health systems.” The health syst...